Candle series 3

 I have never met someone as ruthlessly and joyfully efficient as Barb Gilbert. 

Her executive functioning makes the rest of us look like worms

Like pedants

Like bumps on a log

I struggle for accurate metaphor and the thought crosses my mind:

Barb would have the perfect comparison here.

Candle song series 2

Darling you're burning that candle from so many ends

You must be frazzled

And you're so bright

I'm dazzled

And so hot 

I'm sweating

But where are you getting

All that wick?

And what if you run out?

Imagine space for all your thoughts your therapist says

Do you need a field? A forest? A lake?

They don't fit in your head

I need an the grand canyon,  you tell them, an ocean

It doesn't stay put in the sky

All that commotion

All that noise in just one brain, those wheels must be tired

Your brain's only water

Your candle's just fire

Fish in the sea

 People say there are plenty of fish in the sea

But you're my entire ocean.

I am immersed by you,

Dragged by your undertow.

You are the sand, gritty in my eyes, 

The brine in the breeze and 

You are the sunlight and the places 

Even the sunlight cannot reach.

Chanukah Poem

 Darling, you're burning the candle from both ends and the sides too

And you're so bright

I'm dazzled

And so hot 

I'm sweating

But where are you getting

All that wick?

And what if you run out?

Tangled silk

A spider web sits, woven across the double doors with perfect droplets of dew catching and refracting the sunlight.

Undisturbed it waits. Waits to be seen? To be understood? To catch a fat and wriggling fly and to hold it, living and nourishing until the spider arrives? 

How easily I could tear this web, first through the double doors as I am.

How strong it is, holding the weight of itself and the sparking water and the sunlight and the spider's expectations. 

I expect to see you in this poem. Are you the building? The doors? The web seems most obvious: full of contradictions and beauty and light. So strong and so easy to destroy. 

Maybe you're the one entering the building, ducking around the web. Making the plunge, despite the risk of destruction. All the power in your hands and still you chose kindness. Maybe you're typing these words into the keyboard, your fingers feeling the smooth keys, your ears registering the gentle click as the words move on.

Specificity, the head of fundraising tells me, is the key to being relatable. People are more likely to identify with a specific story than a general one. 

My poetry teacher in college tells me, avoid vast concepts like love and eternity. Think of intimate ways to access things too big to imagine.

All your poems are about you, my brother says. 

Maybe this isn't a poem. Maybe it's a sentence. Maybe it's just that I saw a spider web today and there were dew drops handing from it like jewels and the sun shine through it and I though of the way your eyes are so brown they almost turn green. 

Maybe it doesn't have to be more than that.

Life of the unliving

"My phone died," My tongue forms the syllables, easy, unthinking, as I blithely toss my phone onto the couch where I sink beside my sweetheart. 

Here it lies, ignominious and unremembered. 

What gods are we, to fix life and death with a simple twitch of our hands

To watch as it flows through corded wires and sit un-amazed

The glowing green heart-blood of my laptop's charger

Veins under skin, a declaration of vitality,

I live, I live, I live

The following week, in a parking lot, surrounded by towering oaks and waving lindens

I do not mourn beyond a muttered fuck,

Kicking the tire, and calling a friend.

"My car just died. Can you come give me a jump?"

Transitional space

I miss the liminal spaces of you

The skin in the hallow between your collarbones and your neck

The ecotone between your apartment and the world outside where you pressed me against the wall to kiss me

The edge of evening falling in your kitchen as we cooked dinner

I want to touch these places of yours with the softest calloused tips of my fingers

And bite the curve between your back and your ass until it bruises

I miss these spaces where you are not quite one thing or another

Where we exist just outside of everyone else

Are we on our way to becoming? 

As seen through smudgy glasses

The worst part about being alone in your bed

Is that the sheets still remember the shape of you

Pressed against them.

And as the sun creeps higher in the sky I walk into your kitchen 

And the find the coffee you left out for me is still warm

And the space where you were leaning against the counter is cold. 

Don't make promises

 Please stop promising me the world

When we both know you're only going to give me a crumpled road map and call it "close enough".

I didn't ask for you to bring me the moon

But this little gray rock you've handed me as a substitute is frankly insulting.

I didn't need epochs to the rainbows contained with in my eyes

But you didn't even measure the meter in this couplet.

The eight year old in me

 
The eight year old in me 

Wants you to know

It's not fair that the hickey on my chest is fading slower 

Than our relationship.

Did I say I wanted to be cracked open again? 

Did I say I wanted to feed you the marrow in my ribs? 

Did I say I wanted to show you the menagerie of butterflies in my chest?

I am dizzy with this spin cycle of loving and losing. 

How it goes from comic to tragic in a single turn. 

I am selfish with desires: 

I want my pink house made of love. 

I want to sleep beside another person every night. 

I want to stop bleeding from the marrow now. 

Water on stone

 Here's what it is: I kind if like that I'm hard to bruise. That I can send my lovers home with their necks tattooed with the shape of my mouth but I look untouched. Not pure but maybe stone. 

Here's how it is: I play with the edges of stone butch but never settle there. The most euphoric I feel in my body is during sex and I enjoy the pleasure and I tell my lovers sex isn't a competition. 

Here's how it is: Sex isn't a competition but it's nice to feel valued. Desired. Fucked. Capable of making someone's afternoon a little better or a lot better. Of walking away unmarked. 

Here's how it is: I resent that I have to preform my gender for other people but I only wear pants dancing. I still wear low-necked shirts that show off the curve of my breasts. 

Here's how it is: Gender is always a performance and I delight in memorizing my lines and then reading them in reverse. I like to play the part that contradicts with the people around me. Or maybe that complements, matches. I win the Emmy for supporting gender roles and I want more. 

Here's how it is: I want someone in my bed but I hate how empty the bed feels when they leave. I buy a weighted blanket instead. The marks of my lover invisible but sore to the touch.

Here's how it is: I saw an art exhibit at Mass MOCA and it was a room where the light was strange and the floor tilted and you couldn't tell where you stood and so the space seemed infinite, like there were no walls, no floor. I wanted to dance though the space and I thought when I see art, I feel the desire to create as a palpable, aching thing in my gut.

Here's how it is: When I tell my therapist I am a mess of contradictions, they tell me to imagine the grand canyon and just let my feelings echo across it, bouncing off its infinite walls. "There is enough space" They tell me.

Here's how it is: I chose they as my pronouns because the Walt Whitman line "I contain multitudes" cut straight into the softest bits of me. For me, they is a plural because I am a thousand conflicting feelings crammed into a beautiful and stone body.

Here's how it is:  I am infinite but my time is not. My flesh is not. I don't know what this thing is inside me that people call a soul but I know I am divine because Tricia Hersey told me so and I know everyone I love must have that of god in them because the Quakers taught me that and the Jews taught me that god is light and undefinable and infinite. 

Here's how it is: I am the stone walls of the grand canyon, worn away by the river. I am untouched by the gentle bites of my lovers but I am forever changed by a trickle of water, wearing against my skin. 

Here's how it is: I am the echo of sound bouncing off of walls, getting quieter and quieter but never gone.